Contextualisation of Management Overlays in Ambient Networks

Next generation services requiring adaptability to network and environment changes can be created with the use of flexible, self and service adaptable management overlays. This paper presents such a management overlay, the ambient virtual pipe (AVP) in ambient networks. Contextualisation of an AVP enables it to achieve service adaptation in response to changes in context information. Contextualisation is achieved through interactions with ContextWare, an infrastructure which collects, manages and disseminates context. The contextualisation of the AVP and the architecture and components of ContextWare, are presented along with a proof of concept prototype